The Flare Path: Curious Rover

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Found the camouflaged pillbox in Proteus yet? Or the crashed G4M Betty? No, me neither. I’m starting to think that white owl is a wind-up merchant. From now on I’m only going to trust the crabs. I know they’re honest because they’re the ones who pincer-pointed me in the direction of a staggeringly beautiful Mars mod for Vehicle Simulator, a blue-chip flight model overhaul for Take On Helicopters, and a rather unexpected demo for HPS Simulations’ Ancient Warfare series.

Olympus Trip

Damn you, jafergon! Now I’m aware you’re building a stunning Mars scenery and vehicle set for genre-blurring transport playground Vehicle Simulator, I can’t get a certain image out of my head. When I close my eyes now and think of VSF, I see T. Stone Esq, EVA suit caked in red dust, planting a Union Jack on the top of Olympus Mons.

I’ve got it all worked out. The ascent will be painstakingly documented across five consecutive Flare Paths. You, lucky reader, will be spared nothing. Every imaginary blister and unvented fart, every melancholy banana break and strangled rendition of ‘Forever Autumn’ – it’ll all be recounted in forensic detail.

Then again I might just spend my time in Mars Expedition 1 chasing dust devils in a Martian 12WD, or wandering about high plateaux drinking-in the desolation and admiring the views.

Vehicle Simulator, like its predecessors Virtual Sailor and Micro Flight, makes up for sketchy systems modelling and patchy prototypicality, with sound physics, an impressive array of user-made add-ons, and unusually moody environments. This conversion looks to be pushing the engine’s aptitude for atmosphere to the giddy limit.

Rather appropriately, the red letter day for Red Planet rovers, is March-the-something.

Ancient Warfare Peltaster

FP’s knowledge of military history chariot-skids off a cliff sometime around 1 BC. Without the help of Messrs Wiki and Osprey, frankly, I’d struggle to tell you the difference between a hypaspist and a hip replacement. Phalangites? Weren’t they a faction in the Spanish Civil War?

The first of the free WeGo battles is over in the blink of an eye and designed purely to communicate basic principles. The second scrap – a Greek assault on a Macedonian camp – has more room for manoeuvre and more potential for replay.

If you’ve never encountered an AW title before, the GUI is going to seem almost as dated as the unit fashions. Valuable information on stuff like fatigue levels, combat power, and command structure is spread across various toggleable modes and windows rather than neatly integrated into the main display. It’s only once limitations like these are accepted, that the noisy, low-headcount tussles begin to beguile.

Put a few hours into the demo and then go read assessments from antique aggro authorities such as Flash of Steel’s Troy Goodfellow and you should, finally, be in a position to confidently buy or bypass the Ancient Warfare series.

I was planning to reconnoitre Slitherine’s Field of Glory this week – do a spot of compare-and-contrast – but having learnt that a major refurbishment project is underway (the series, like Close Combat, is being upgraded via the Unity engine) will postpone that visit until the relaunch in March.

Fred has done what he can to address issues in the light and medium FMs (ToH’s heavies await attention). The easily installed result of his labours can be found here. Expect crisper stick and collective responses, more naturalistic torque effects, and – if you’re accustomed to the default behaviours – a few buckled skids early on as you adjust to a saggier ground effect cushion.

Rainbow Synapse

What do ex-sub sim designers do once they’ve blown ballast for the final time? If you’re Dan Dimitrescu, one of the Romanians behind the rebirth of Silent Hunter, you found a little indie studio called KillHouse Games and start making digital diversions about top-down tango take-downs.

There’s scant information available at present, but looking at those screenshots with their echoes of Frozen Synapse and Rainbow Six/Rogue Spear, and knowing Dan’s interest in hardcore military matters, I’d be disappointed if breaching charges, baton rounds, and believable ballistics, weren’t on the feature list come release day.

The Flare Path Foxer

Using their minds as machetes, corinoco, zabzonk and phlebas hacked a path straight to the heart of last week’s ‘Things Wot You Find in the Amazonian Rainforest’ foxer. En-route they spotted the twitching tail of a SEPECAT Jaguar, the jutting jaw of a Mowag Piranha, a Blowpipe-toting local, a dozing W-3RM Anakonda, a Hitlerian Hummingbird, an ex-Policeman and the mighty Amazon in full spate.

To work-out this week’s theme and claim an FP flair point decorated with gaudy Martian canal art, just stare at the seven clues above until your brain starts to steam like an overworked Alpini pack mule.

Agreed, I was briefly trying to work out if the ground was moving or something else really weird in the early shots before realising that the rocks were all sprite based and so that explained the motion. That could really do with some fixing as it’s far more distracting that the last recent example I can think of (Dear Esther grass) due to the distinct and very static in the real world objects rotation for the camera.

I think the helicopter is a Mil Mi-4 … and could that be a Beechcraft Bonanza with the V-tail?
And I think the tail is a Lockheed Constellation not a P-38 Lightning.
Looks like a Baker rifle not a musket.

The vertical stabilizers of the P-38 are directly in line with the twin fuselages. Whereas here there is clearly no fuselage. But wait – I was wrong – a Constellation it is not, but perhaps a Lockheed Hudson, (as in Mrs) Landlady of Sherlock Holmes…

Ah yes, Hound, Baker, (Over)Strand – makes sense – the Bonanza is in front of the Eiffel Tower (as in “Case of”), that’ll be Mrs. Hudson’s Lockheedey tail, and there’s a lion which presumably hasn’t been shorn. However I don’t recognise the pointy nose – looks like one of those ’50s experimental planes, but it doesn’t ring any X-1s with me.

I’m pretty sure the bottom pointy one is a Lockheed-Martin starfighter.

Maybe because Sherlock himself is, being capable of beating the best prizefighters in London?

Or, the actor in the most recent reincarnation of Sherlock(BBC’s one) has the actor Martin Freeman playing Dr. Watson? I was watching the Hobbit, and say there for 2 hours thinking ‘I know that face’. As it turns out it was Martin Freeman playing Bilbo Baggings. I had just watching a Sherlock Marathon the week before.

I thought Starfighter too at first, but the cockpit canopy is all wrong. The only match I could find is the Fairey Delta 2, which even has the little tube thing sticking out of the underside of the nose so I’m sticking with that.
Also, two Lockheed products in one foxer?

Yep, I’ll agree with the Fairey Delta 2; the slanted line just below and aft of the cockpit is where the ‘droop snoot’ closes. The starfighter has a very different canopy, a slightly more bulbous nose and… OMG where have I left my furry hood?

The mod definitely improves the medium’s performance, but it still can be overtorqued if you move too much with the collective raised. It’s probably more realistic like this – I hated how previously you’d overtorque the medium if you so much as thought about turning the helicopter with the anti-torque pedals (or rolling the helicopter slightly with the collective raised). I’m really happy to see the HTR guy working to make ToH more realistic!

Haha, tell me about it. I didn’t play ToH until after a few of the patches were released. Apparently on release, the missions were perfectly do-able, then they made the flight/damage model very unforgiving and didn’t change the missions to suit. I don’t know how I fluked finishing that missions, but I do know that I crashed right as it finished…

I almost, almost ended up buying after watching but realized I just enjoyed his AAR reports rather than the act of playing. I do wish that warsim was a big enough genera as it had been in the past that it could get some major production AND a sheen of wargamer spit mixed together.

Shame he’s got the colours wrong for Mars. It actually has blue skies much like earth, it’s just that NASA likes to colour its photos to fit the public perception of how they think it should look; so there you go.

I thought the scattering of dust and the height of that dust in the atmosphere created a butterscotch sky. Scattering makes them orange/pink with blue close to the sun around the time the it rises or sets – like the earth but in reverse.

I assume there’s a more… credible source for that info out there somewhere? I had my reservations when, in questioning which set of ‘evidence’ we should believe, he described one of the parties as “de good guys”, but this was compounded when I happened to notice that the site as a whole is not necessarily a bastion of scientific rationality.

Oh wait, that’s right. Nothing. Humans tend to see faces in all kinds of inanimate objects, probably because we spend so much of our earliest development with the big faces of our parents looking down at us.

Given that other parts of the site question exactly when the Annunaki began construction of Cydonia based on estimate of when they’d shipped gold back from Earth to “fix Mars’ atmosphere”, suggesting ulterior motives on NASA’s part is probably quite reasonable in comparison.

If you think Robin`s story is neat…, last pay check my boy frends brother basically also earnt $4350 grafting a eighteen hour week at home and they’re classmate’s mom`s neighbour was doing this for 6 months and easily made more than $4350 part time on-line. follow the tips on this address… http://www.Cloud65.com

Re. the need for demos of games set in ancient history, Hegemony Gold: Wars of Ancient Greece has a demo on Steam, and is quite interesting. I haven’t really dug into the full game yet, but the demo sold me on it.